I like the idea of standards, which will make it easier for one application to communicate with another and quite a few of those standards already exist. It will just take us to start coding to those standards better. It is easy to see how once a few applications become smarter in how they communicate with each other they will gain a definite marketing edge and more applications will follow.

Adam you may be right that we need more smart people to pull this all off. But keep in mind it only takes a few really smart people to lead the way and make it easy for the rest of us who aren’t quite as smart.

So I was interested in the “Defining Web 3.0″ post. Unfortunately I couldn’t finish it. Under “Web 2.0″ the first item is the Starbanes-Oxley ( aka SOX ) legislation regarding corporate governance. I got the idea our correspondent doesn’t understand SOX; it doesn’t make it impossible for anyone outside a small oligarchy to launch a corporation. And it really doesn’t have much at all to do with the web, at least the way I see the world. The history of early photography is a little questionable, but the future presented is just absurd. The idea that almost no one will have a camera because they can be photographed in front of any monument by a crowd of “opportunistic” photographers makes great science fiction. But how do you get all those baby pictures in your living room?

I really like the idea of a “semantic web,” which is what’s offered. I think it will be a while off still, but eventually if enough sites are coded properly, or at least predictably, machines will be able to do a lot more for us. Yahoo Pipes tries to do what we’re talking about, although I haven’t heard anything about it since it’s launch. Search engines will read Wikipedia to gain background knowledge and give you much better answers to your queries. I’m not sure if I’d call that the third evolution of the web; it will coexist with sites that don’t even use CSS. But it will certainly make things more interesting!